L. S. Lowry - Retirement

Retirement

Lowry retired from the Pall Mall Property Company in 1952 on his 65th birthday (McLean, 1978). He became chief cashier but never stopped collecting rents. The firm supported his development as an artist and allowed time off for exhibitions in addition to his annual leave. It seems that he was not proud of his job; secrecy about his employment by the company is widely seen as a desire to present himself as a serious artist but the secrecy extended beyond the art world into his social circle.

Margery Thompson met him when she was a schoolgirl and he became part of her family circle. He attended concerts with her family and friends, visited her home and entertained her at his Pendlebury home, where he shared his knowledge of painting. They remained friends until his death, but he never told her that he had any work except his art. In the 1950s he visited friends at Cleator Moor in Cumberland (where Geoffrey Bennett was the manager at the National Westminster Bank) and Southampton (where Margery Thompson had moved after her marriage). He painted pictures of the bank in Cleator Moor, Southampton Floating Bridge and other scenes local to his friends' homes.

In 1957 an unrelated 13-year-old schoolgirl called Carol Ann Lowry wrote to him at her mother's urging to ask his advice on becoming an artist. He visited her home in Heywood and befriended the family. His friendship with Carol Ann Lowry lasted for the rest of his life.

Lowry joked about retiring from the art world, citing his lack of interest in the changing landscape. Instead, he began to focus on groups of figures and odd imaginary characters. Unknown to his friends and the public, Lowry produced a series of erotic works which were not seen until after his death. The paintings depict the mysterious "Ann" figure, who appears in portraits and sketches produced throughout his lifetime, enduring sexually-charged and humiliating tortures. When these works were exhibited at the Art Council's Centenary exhibition at the Barbican in 1988, art critic Richard Dorment wrote in the Daily Telegraph that these works "reveal a sexual anxiety which is never so much as hinted at in the work of the previous 60 years." The group of erotic works, which are sometimes referred to as "the mannequin sketches" or "marionette works" are kept at the Lowry Centre and are available for visitors to see on request. Some are also brought up into the public display area on a rotation system. Manchester author Howard Jacobson has argued that the images are just part of Lowry's melancholy and tortured view of the world and that they would change the public perception of the complexity of his work if they were more widely seen.